News & Research

arXiv:2606.29755v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aiming at the problem that obstacle avoidance flexibility and formation integrity are difficult to coexist in multi-UAV formation motion in complex obstacle environments , and that the traditional artificial potential field (APF) method easily falls into local optima, a cooperative obstacle avoidance algorithm for multi-UAV formations integrating BI-APF-RRT and affine transformation is proposed. First, abandoning the traditional APF centroid path planning method , a goal-biased Bidirectional Artificial Potential Field method RRT (BI-APF-RRT) algorithm is adopted to conduct global collision-free path planning for the centroid of the leader formation. By introducing an improved artificial potential field and cubic B-spline interpolation, the smoothness and rapid convergence of the global path are ensured. Secondly, using the generated global path as the guiding trajectory for the formation's centroid , combined with an affine transformation

arXiv:2606.29738v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-time monocular Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) fundamentally suffers from scale ambiguity and a lack of geometric self-correction. While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables high-fidelity rendering, existing RGB-only systems remain open-loop because depth priors are injected into mapping but refined geometry cannot effectively regulate tracking drift. We present MyGO-Splat, a closed-loop Gaussian SLAM framework that analytically rasterizes Gaussian primitives into pixel-wise depth and surface normals, allowing the map to actively supervise camera pose optimization. To bridge monocular priors and scale consistency, our framework introduces scale-aware adaptive alignment that projects foundation-model depth estimates into the globally optimized Gaussian space, forming a self-correcting cycle for scale feedback. Extensive evaluations show that this closed-loop design improves scale stability and appearance-geometry consiste

arXiv:2606.29731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robots working in unstructured or partially unobservable environments must combine accurate motion with physical compliance that can passively correct contact misalignment. Soft robots provide this compliance but have struggled to precisely control their tip compliance and position. This paper presents a robot architecture designed around that control problem: a 7-link arm whose six articulated joints provide twelve independently driven revolute axes, each actuated by an antagonistic pair of pneumatic muscles, so that every axis can simultaneously change its angle and linearly adjust its stiffness. The rigid articulated backbone makes the tip compliance and position of the arm predictable enough to be commanded quantitatively in real time. The robot employs a unified iterative inverse-kinematics and inverse-compliance controller to achieve simultaneous, quantitative control of both compliance and position. The task-space compliance and ki

arXiv:2606.29677v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Connected and automated vehicle (CAV) platooning promises gains in energy efficiency and traffic throughput and, most critically, in safety. These safety benefits hinge on string stability, which determines how disturbances propagate along a platoon. While longitudinal string stability is well studied, lateral string stability, which governs the propagation of path-tracking errors that can lead to unsafe deviations from the intended path, remains underexplored. Its importance is increasing as autonomous vehicles rely more heavily on onboard sensing and map-free navigation, where sensor occlusion and dense formations amplify safety risks. This paper presents a new framework for lateral string stability that directly addresses safety-critical path-relative tracking errors and enables consistent comparison across vehicles following the same road geometry. Central to this framework is an arc-length (Eulerian) viewpoint, a departure from tradi

arXiv:2606.29673v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cooperative localization using range-based measurements is critical for multi-robot systems operating in GPS-denied and unstructured environments. However, traditional cooperative approaches require sharing explicit spatial coordinates across the network, presenting a severe security vulnerability in privacy-sensitive missions. While recent literature has explored privacy-preserving alternatives, these methods typically rely on accuracy-degrading noise injection or computationally prohibitive cryptographic protocols. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel, natively privacy-preserving Decentralized Cooperative Localization (DCL) framework based on convex optimization. Discarding probabilistic noise models, we assume strictly bounded measurement noise and formulate the localization problem via Semi-Definite Programming (SDP) to compute a Maximum-Volume Inscribed Ellipsoid (MVE). Our approach introduces novel intersection-plane co

arXiv:2606.29570v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we identify a semantic decomposition in robot action sequences, separating task-level motion intent from execution-level refinements. By analyzing actions in the spectral domain using the discrete cosine transform (DCT), we observe that low-frequency components capture global motion trajectories, while high-frequency components encode precise timing, alignment, and contact behaviors. Motivated by this structure, we propose Causal Spectral Policy (CSP), which models action generation as a causal coarse-to-fine process: coarse motion is predicted from observation and language, and fine corrections are generated conditionally on the realized trajectory. Across simulation and real-world evaluations, CSP consistently outperforms strong baselines on precision-sensitive manipulation tasks. Additionally, we propose human-inspired teleoperation noise injection as a data augmentation method, under which our approach demonstrates stro

arXiv:2606.29566v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Locating a vehicle and determining its orientation in an uncertain environment is a critical challenge in autonomous vehicle navigation and path planning. To address these challenges, a vehicle estimates its pose while depending on sensor data that offer noisy measurements. These uncertainties in pose quantities are expressed mathematically as a covariance matrix. The real-time computation of the covariance matrix is critical because of the non-linearity involved in the kinematic model. The challenge is thus to evaluate the evolution of the covariance matrix of a vehicle's discretized stochastic kinematics. The purpose of this study is to obtain a near-accurate evolution of the covariance matrix of the rear-wheel bicycle kinematic model under uncertainties in wheel displacement and steering angle. We used Taylor's series to linearize the nonlinear trigonometric functions and provided closed-form expectations of random variables with the r

arXiv:2606.29517v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robot imitation learning often relies on costly robot demonstrations, while abundant action-free visual demonstrations, such as human videos, are difficult to use because they lack robot-executable actions and suffer from embodiment gaps. We propose CORE, a policy learning framework that extracts Common Outcome Regularities (CORE) from visual demonstrations. Rather than transferring explicit actions across embodiments, CORE exploits a key observation: although successful trajectories for the same task can be diverse, their terminal states often share stable object configurations, spatial relations, and contact constraints. CORE first trains a terminal outcome encoder with contrastive and auxiliary temporal objectives, then aggregates successful terminal embeddings into visual goal prototypes, and finally injects these prototypes as global goal conditions into robot policies. Compared with language instructions, visual goal prototypes

arXiv:2606.29501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study action-conditioned world modeling as a scalable way to learn transferable dynamics priors for robot learning. By pretraining a model to predict how actions drive visual scene evolution, the resulting world model captures reusable interaction dynamics beyond appearance-level video generation. Concretely, we pretrain a multi-view interactive base diffusion world model, A2World, on large-scale robot manipulation data with real action annotations. We validate the learned dynamics priors from two complementary perspectives. First, we adapt A2World into a task- or scene-specialized real-world simulator, A2World-sim, whose long-horizon rollouts support simulator-based policy evaluation and scalable what-if analysis by replacing real-robot rollouts with world model rollouts. Second, starting from the same pretrained weights, we adapt A2World into a video-action joint prediction model, A2World-policy, that predicts actions under visual an

arXiv:2606.29460v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in social robots to support natural group interactions, yet their role in complex multi-party settings remains underexplored. In particular, it is unclear how LLM-driven robots decide when and why to intervene in group conversations. This paper investigates the intervention explanations generated by an LLM-based orchestrator in a multi-party interaction involving three human participants and two robots. We conducted a between-subjects study with 24 groups (66 university students), comparing a homogeneous condition (two robots with the same role, i.e., a mover) and a heterogeneous condition (two robots with different roles, i.e., a mover and an opposer). At each conversational turn, the LLM orchestrator decided whether to intervene and generated a textual explanation of its decision. We performed a thematic analysis of 610 intervention explanations, identifying five recurring themes. R

arXiv:2606.29372v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Massive robot swarms can explore unknown environments quickly, but adding robots eventually stops helping. Doorways and dense traffic create congestion, increasing inter-robot contacts and reducing the value of each additional robot. We study this safety-efficiency tradeoff for ground swarms of tens to hundreds of robots. We present SPACE, Swarm Pheromone Fields for Adaptive Collision-Aware Exploration. Inspired by ant foraging, SPACE maintains a shared environmental field with an attractive frontier pheromone, a repellent explore pheromone, and a fast robot-density field. Coordination is decentralized and mediated through this field. We evaluate SPACE on real building floorplans, namely sixteen home layouts from the HouseExpo dataset and eight campus floors from the KTH dataset, with swarms of up to two hundred and fifty-six robots. SPACE lies on the empirical Pareto frontier. It attains the lowest inter-robot contact rate at every conge

arXiv:2606.29358v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-robot manipulation requires jointly reasoning about contact formations, robot motions under coupled dynamics, and collision avoidance. Systematically searching over this large space is difficult and becomes increasingly intractable as the number of robots grows, the task horizon lengthens, or the scene becomes more densely cluttered. Existing approaches therefore either learn to solve the problem end-to-end via reinforcement learning or restrict planning to a simpler surrogate problem, such as planning object motions while learning short-horizon contact primitives. However, neither paradigm scales to the problem instances we target: long-horizon multi-robot manipulation in extremely dense environments. In this paper, we propose Long-horizon Adaptive Manipulation Planning (LAMP), a framework combining a generative model for manipulation with classical planning for long-horizon reasoning. We instantiate our framework with two algo

arXiv:2606.29259v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Thermal imaging is resilient to adverse conditions, such as intense illumination, low-light operation, and fog, and can therefore mitigate odometry degradation when visible-spectrum imagery becomes unreliable. Nevertheless, most thermal cameras employ automatic gain control (AGC), and thermal images often present low global contrast despite containing informative edge structures. These characteristics undermine brightness constancy and cause conventional optical flow tracking-based odometry pipelines that fundamentally rely on the brightness constancy assumption across consecutive frames. To address these issues, we propose a general LiDAR-Inertial-Thermal SLAM system that accommodates both visible-light and thermal cameras. PL-LIT combines an online photometric calibration module with a deep neural network for point-line feature extraction, enabling more stable and repeatable thermal tracking. For state estimation, we design a tightly co

arXiv:2606.29237v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robust robot autonomy depends on scene representations that remain stable enough to support localization, navigation, and downstream decision making in dynamic environments. Monocular Gaussian Splatting SLAM provides high-fidelity mapping, but current uncertainty-aware methods still treat dynamic regions largely as per-frame observations. This makes the representation effectively memoryless: when a pedestrian slows, pauses, or reappears after occlusion, the current frame may look static, allowing dynamic content to be absorbed into the map and leaving persistent ghosting artifacts. We argue that this failure reflects a representation-level mismatch. Dynamic-ness is not an instantaneous appearance property, but a temporal property defined by motion history. Building on this view, we introduce Motion Permanence: the principle that an object's dynamic identity should persist over time rather than be re-decided from each frame independently.

arXiv:2606.29222v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous navigation in unknown environments requires a robot to efficiently reach a predefined goal while exploring without prior maps. Although progress has been made in this area, most existing works still rely on traditional planning methods with hand-crafted rules, while learning-based methods often suffer from limited environmental memory and challenges in simulation-to-real (sim-to-real) transfer. To overcome these limitations, we propose a Contextual-memory Oriented Reinforcement-learning (CORE) planner for robot navigation in unknown environments. The proposed CORE planner effectively combines the core advantages of traditional and learning-based methods. Specifically, our method uses a sparse visibility graph for structured environment representation, reducing the computational overhead of dense grid maps, and employs a Transformer network to achieve a holistic environmental understanding, thereby significantly improving naviga